My name is Dr. Leonard A. Lado, MD and I would personally like to welcome to you to my practice's website. I am a board certified Psychiatrist in Bonita Springs Florida and South Florida. I serve the population of Marco Island, Fort Myers, Naples and Southwest Florida. My specialty is the treatment of non-Methadone Detox, Oxycontin and Pain Killer Addiction, Cocaine Addiction, Alcohol Dependence, and Crystal Meth Addiction using state of the art outpatient Suboxone and medication treatments.

This site has been designed with the mission to educate you and enable you to make informed decisions about your condition. Within my practice, I promote and facilitate my personal beliefs that patients are adequately intelligent in order to understand their condition and that patients deserve to be sincerely included in identifying reasons for their conditions and treatments for their disorders. People are intuitive by nature and are capable of deciding who they trust to treat them when they are ill. I hope to share with you my knowledge and expertise in order to help you cope with your current condition, gaining your trust and confidence.

Information on addiction recovery via the internet can be confusing. I designed this website to facilitate the understanding of our brain in the face of malfunction. If we begin to understand that the brain is simply another organ just like the heart, pancreas, liver, etc. maybe the stigma of mental illness can be set aside and allow people to come out of their closets and into the light of recovery and health.

The treatment of addiction, mental illness or any brain disease requires a great deal of knowledge and learning from our patients struggles. Addiction can now be treated without hospitalization, and in most cases with new and exciting treatments that includeSuboxone. Drug rehabilitation has changed greatly over the past 5 years. What we have learned over the years is that people with substance abuse often have other untreated disorders like generalized anxiety disorder and mood disorders that self medicate themselves with drugs to treat their undiagnosed illness. After detox, treating what we call co-existing disorders help improve their chance for recovery.

I am a strong believer that drug addiction will destroy our society long before global warming. Please look at the 'Drug News' section and see for yourself. What is very worrysome is that serious psychological distress (SPD) continues to be associated with drug abuse. SPD was associated with substance dependence or abuse in 2006. Among adults aged 18 or older with SPD, 22.3 percent were dependent on or abused illicit drugs or alcohol. The rate among adults without SPD was 7.7 percent. Past year illicit drug use was higher among adults aged 18 or older with SPD (27.2 percent) than among adults without SPD (12.3 percent). Similarly, the rate of past month cigarette use was higher among adults with SPD (44.2 percent) than among adults without SPD (24.5 percent).

I would like to thank the many patients who have shared their lives and taught me a great deal about medicine and psychiatry through their struggles and triumph. Many of the testimonials come through their experiences in drug rehab and outpatient treatment. However I have to caution you with reviews from fake websites that use negative reputation to draw business. Many of these websites are owned by shady companies and that hire professional fake patients to draw business. One of them is called ratemd.com. They want the physicians to pay up to $200 dollars per month to remove negative false information. The best source of physician information is the state board websites. Many patient who have addictions have doctor shopping behaviors and when they do not get their drugs of addiction, these type of patient retaliate but writing negative reviews. I have added their simple letters of testimonials. So please, welcome to my practice in the mediterranean and tropical cities of Naples and Bonita Springs Florida.

The biggest challenge in the field of psychiatry are simply two fold. Making the correct psychiatric diagnosis and matching the medications with the person's own metabolism. My practice has the ability to do both Computer Assisted Psychiatric Diagnosis and Pharmacogenetic Testing for Psychotropic Medication response, which takes out the guessing game of matching the right medication for the highly probable diagnosis and patient metabolism. Pharmacogenetic testing is now possible in our facility and we obtain results within 10-14 days. An excellent web site on how this technology works in our practice is best described by a personalized medicine company AssureRXHealth. Right now in doctors' offices all over the world, patients are given medications that either don't work or have bad side effects. Often, a patient must return to their doctor over and over again until the doctor can find a drug that is right for them. Pharmacogenomics offers a very appealing alternative. Leonard Lado MD now offers a simple and rapid test of your DNA. This gives me the ability to determine if the patients have the possibility of suffering a severe negative reaction to the medication due to side effects. Pharmacogenomic testing is now availabe in Lee, Collier and Charlotte counties, and right here in our Bonita Springs office.

Personalized Medicine
Personalized medicine is the tailoring of medical treatment to the individual characteristics of each patient. Personalized medicine is now possible because sophisticated molecular and informatics tools are available to physicians to individualize patient treatment. New methods to select drugs or treatments tailored to each patient make better treatment outcomes possible with fewer adverse reactions to treatment. Personalizing treatment represents a substantial shift in medical practice from what worked for a "typical" patient to what now works for each "individual" patient.

Pharmacogenetics
The term pharmacogenetics refers to the study of how genes affect the way a patient responds to medication. Genetic differences can influence the efficacy of medications, can be the source of serious drug side-effects, and increase the risk of drug-to-drug interactions. By having an evidence-based report of a patient's genetic drug suitability profile, a clinician can better understand how their specific patients may react to a medication.

Two concepts serve as the backbone of pharmacogenetics. The first is pharmacokinetics, which can be defined generally as the study of how the body metabolizes a drug. Each drug has its own unique metabolic profile, meaning each drug has a specific set of enzymes responsible for catalyzing the absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) of a medication.

Numerous genetic variants affect how much of these enzymes an individual can produce. Having too little of an enzyme can cause a drug to build up in a patient's system and result in adverse drug reactions (ADRs). Producing too much of an enzyme may cause the patient's body to excrete a medication too quickly, preventing the drug from ever reaching optimal therapeutic levels. The amount of enzyme available for each individual can be predicted through genetic testing.